We made a change quite a while ago to the homepage of Stack Overflow which was well-intentioned, but I'm starting to think may have been a mistake.

The change was to switch Stack Overflow away from showing all recent activity to showing a slice of recent activity. So far so good: there's too much stuff happening to show it all (the homepage of the site was spanning all of about 3 minutes at the time), so each user gets their own personalized slice. It emphasizes your tags, so you see more of the stuff you like.

However, as part of the same change we decided to emphasize unanswered questions. You can read the exact algorithm in the original post but the upshot is this: good, answered questions fall off the homepage really fast, if they ever show up at all.

I decided to do some informal comparisons of other sites that still use the old algorithm. Mostly I don't have any activity on those sites, so I'm seeing what a new or anonymous user would see:

Significantly, on every one of those other sites I usually saw at least 3 or 4 highly upvoted & viewed posts, and on Stack Overflow rarely saw even 1. Here's a comparison of the top 10 questions on the logged-out Ask Ubuntu homepage vs. Stack Overflow. Ask Ubuntu has 4 top questions in the list, SO has 0 (click for bigger version):

The other sites use a simple algorithm: show the most recently touched stuff. It ends up working out like this:

Crappy questions get one pass through the homepage and fall off fairly quickly

Good questions get multiple passes through the homepage, bumping back up every time they're edited or answered

The end result is that Stack Overflow is highlighting the junk instead of the good posts. It's doing it for a good reason, to try to get these questions answered, but it creates:

A "broken window" effect where all new users see on SO are crappy questions, which seems to justify their crappy question.

A reinforcement cycle, where poor questions get more time on the homepage because they aren't getting answered

An overall impression that Stack Overflow is drowning in junk.

Now, to be clear, Stack Overflow quality is slowly declining as the site gets bigger. The answer rate has dropped to 77% now. But Ask Ubuntu's answer rate is an even worse 67% and you'd still come away from its homepage with an idea of why the site is good.

So here's my proposal:

By default, show a mix of hot & unanswered questions on the homepage, more in line with other sites (35% / 65% or so).

Add quick filter options to narrow down to just unanswered or just hot, for people looking only for one or the other.

In line with my other proposal, give some extra filter options for power users to control what they see.

Something like this (WARNING: UNPOLISHED MOCKUP AHEAD):

At first, this'd just be an alternative to the "interesting" tab, but when it's ready it'd replace it as the homepage.

Obviously this doesn't really solve the quality problems, but it'd at least be a start towards highlighting the better content while at the same time making it even easier to find something to answer. It's one small step, with many more to come.

@Benjamin if this kind of filtering interface turns out to be useful, we can expand it to other pages. I was just trying to keep the scope of the change small so we can try it out.
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David Fullerton♦Jun 6 '14 at 21:28

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@DavidFullerton Now I'm curious. Are there any statistics on the referral pages of authors of answers? How many got there from the main page?
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Benjamin GruenbaumJun 6 '14 at 21:32

5

It's worth mentioning that this is one of a bunch of things we're working on to improve and detect average quality. In addition to the idea in David's linked post, we've got a group analyzing a bunch of other ideas on the question screen, smarter quality analysis, toothier q-bans, etc.
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Jaydles♦Jun 6 '14 at 21:45

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Can we please define a metric (and if necessary add collection of statistics for it) that we can measure its success by?
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PlasmaHHJun 6 '14 at 23:28

40

Can you add a "hit me with the firehose" button? I want to see it all, the stream. Right in the face. I can take it.
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Chris BakerJun 7 '14 at 2:40

27

I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to read a post from a Stack Exchange team member that is honest about the current state of Stack Overflow. The denial gets old and frustrating. We appreciate all that you're doing to try and fix the problems.
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Cody GrayJun 7 '14 at 7:26

I don't understand what answer rate has to do with quality. Low-quality questions have way more answers than high-quality ones. Or I fully misunderstand that sentence :). Btw, the idea is good.
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kapaJun 7 '14 at 11:54

6 Answers
6

Stack Overflow is the premier Q&A site for programmers. However, I have to admit I access it via Google. I will skip over 1 or 2 Google ranked answers if I see a Stack Exchange answer. When Google's top answer is not on Stack Overflow, I already feel like it's going to waste my time going there.

I use a plugin to specifically kill all Ask.com and other negative-quality spam sites.

So really, I think the underlying issue is more about helping Google serve up the better answers. Duplicates help because they link to the better answers? The home page specifically does not help, because it looks like a lame Ask.com. If Google linked there it would be useless.

Can you guys cooperate with Google to improve the way they rank inside Stack Overflow? They may already do that, but it would not hurt to ask since they likely already love this site. Google linking to the highest Stack Overflow ranked page would be way better than Google linking to an inferior, but more referenced answer...

You find questions to answer by searching on Google? "Hmm, let's see, I want to answer a question about closures in C#..."
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Cody GrayJun 9 '14 at 0:48

3

@Cody Gray, no, there is no Google search for unanswered questions. How is that germane to this answer? David Fullerton is asking for comments on how to improve the home page because he feels an old change led to an overall drop quality. This answer has nothing to do with unanswered SO questions and everything to do with integrating better with Google search, probably the main way most people search here (not the main page). Each time someone is sent to ask.com for a programmer question is a Google & SO fail. Google + SO cooperating to take votes into account is a search relevance win.
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Dirk BesterJun 9 '14 at 1:48

6

@CodyGray is right, you have missed the point. The OP's theory is that the home page led to a drop in quality, because of people who use that page to look for unanswered questions. Rather than seeing mainly good questions with decent answers, which they could contribute to and improve, they started seeing mainly crappy questions. This led to some good answerers answering fewer questions, and some other answerers spending a lot of time answering poor quality questions. This lowered the quality of responses on the site, and encouraged lazy questioners to post more questions.
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jwgJun 9 '14 at 8:09

@jwg, look I fully understand that this answer is off topic regarding the home page changes. I am adding a suggestion for the underlying problem of quality. Others have already more than handled improving the algorithm the home page uses.
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Dirk BesterJun 9 '14 at 17:34

3

If you're consciously not responding to this question, I'd suggest either posting your proposal as its own discussion (best) or finding another discussion to which it's a more direct reply.
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Josh CaswellJun 9 '14 at 18:50

The best way to ensure Google ranks you highly is to have the answer that is most useful to the searcher. (We do obviously keep an eye on anything they say helps them, or that makes them suspicious, but we generally assume that other than the most obvious stuff, our best SEO is just trying to make the system help the community provide the best, most readable answer.)
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Jaydles♦Jun 9 '14 at 20:00

Genuinely, when I want an answer in programming, I search on Google, mostly, useful results from StackOverflow returns, but when I search the same keywords in this site, I can never (maybe rarely) can find them. /// I don't see a good reason to get Google involved in this site. 1 Search Engine VS 2 Search Engine, which is better/// P.S. Google: [ MyKeywords site:stackoverflow.com/ ]
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Daniel CheungJun 10 '14 at 14:14

I would prefer a 'view by rating' filter that can be set by the user, so those who would like to answer the highly popular questions can get them through the filter, those who want to answer the unpopular or downvoted questions (in other words, help the novice) they can get such questions, another category which shows unvoted or netural questions, so that users can help categorize them. Another category in which one can get a mix of all types of questions...

This system helps in the way that novice or newbies are not neglected as well as professionals will not be annoyed by questions which are not of their standard.

I would also like to say another thing.

There should be an option for guest users to vote. Something like a separate button or guests to vote. It can be titled 'guest votes' and display their votes. So that two types of votes exists-those by login users and those by guest users. The reason why I suggest this is that a lot of guests come to this community through Google and other searche engines. If they find the question and answer useful, they don't get the oppertunity to appreciate the answer.

And most of them will not sign up in this community just to vote (those votes are lost and those are lots of votes!!). You can observe this; there are many users with reputation about 50 ever after years of joining. That means they came for a specific purpose and then left. They came either to ask a question(probably) or answer a question.

It sounds like one of your proposed options is "find help vampires to feed" masquerading under a different name :( Your overall concept is good, but some more thought needs to go into this to avoid enabling destructive behavior.
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Ben VoigtJun 8 '14 at 16:54

What about those questions long left untouched? Will they just get decayed?
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Daniel CheungJun 10 '14 at 14:18

@DanielCheung it once more with open eyes..."those who want to answer the unpopular or down voted questions"----I don't know whether you will upvote an unanswered question...definitly I won't.
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Nidhin DavidJun 10 '14 at 17:29

@NidhinDavid Look, you system gathers the best voted question and the worst voted questions, which are 2 extremes. What about the questions without votes and no one knows how to solve the worst bug in a program? They could be useful, but your system will ignore them. Your system is styled like a magazine, but someone needs to answer questions, not just reading interesting ones.
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Daniel CheungJun 11 '14 at 9:02

Unregistered user come here looking for a solution. You may show categories, to let the people navigate to the topic they are looking for.
I think you need to show good answers to common problems to help the new user to find their answers.

People that are not logged in don't care too much about unanswered questions.

On the other hand, for registered users, you may show unanswered questions in their prefered topics.

I'm not sure that many unregistered users, who come here looking for solutions, are entering through the home page. They are entering through Google results, i.e. going to the question page directly.
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Mr ListerJun 7 '14 at 5:04

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@MrLister The stats on that are presumably collected. Are they available for mere mortals like me to view?
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ClickRickJun 7 '14 at 15:29

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Even if they didn't use Google, they would use the search feature. Surely no one just browses for an answer to their question. This is for people looking to find questions to answer.
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Cody GrayJun 9 '14 at 0:49

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@CodyGray Shows little research :) Who knows what people will do. Browsing the tags/questions maybe useful if you don't know a concept/keyword to search for. So, they may not look for a specific answer, but for general concepts/keywords that might find the answer. In fact, many new posters often lack some concept.
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artless noiseJun 9 '14 at 18:43

What do these mean? And then there are advanced filters, a textbox for tags, more options with recent/needs answer/hot.

Just seems like a lot of stuff. Honestly, how many of you have clicked and used these options? I think in terms of the question list, the system should just figure it out for each user (which I imagine it's already doing). I think there should just be the time filter, the tag filter and a button or link with "advanced" and only then would all these options appear in a popup.

It IS important to cater to the experts who give answers, since they (we) are the lifeblood of the site. But nearly all the experts have logins, and most have defined interesting tags, etc. There is no reason whatsoever for the view shown to a guest user to be optimized for finding answerable questions. New users, or even existing users hitting the site without logging in, do so because they're looking for answers.

So show top questions by default. Require users to login or click a tab to reach unanswered questions. And give the user a larger free-form search field where they can type a few things about their problem and the site automatically shows links to relevant questions. The algorithm for the "relevant" sidebar is pretty good, make that available that on the homepage.

And whatever the user types in can also be kept as a draft, until they choose to clear it and start another search.

But we can do even better. For logged-in users, don't just use the interesting tags, but analyze the user's activity1. I answer a lot of questions, so show me unanswered questions, both in tags I've marked interesting, and in ones I answer a lot but haven't bothered to mark.

It IS important to cater to the experts who give answers, since they (we) are the lifeblood of the site => +1000000000; some people just do not get that.
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lpappJun 7 '14 at 5:59

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"For logged-in users, don't just use the interesting tags, but analyze the user's activity" I believe that they already do this. Your report would look like this. Mine is creepily accurate.
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Cody GrayJun 7 '14 at 7:29

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I particularly like that by "cater to" you mean "create out-of-the-way tools that they can choose to go to and use to get what they want". Too often (and I don't mean just on this site, in all walks of UX), "cater to" is used to mean "screw up the experience of everyone else in favour of".
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Steve JessopJun 7 '14 at 9:30

@Cody Thanks for the link, quite interesting the study. And I agree with you it is a bit creepy...
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LlopisJun 7 '14 at 14:15

@Steve: Well, the purpose is to figure out what users need what views, so they are neither out of the way nor screwing up the experience of others.
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Ben VoigtJun 7 '14 at 15:37

@Cody: Mine said "updated Jan". So while it may have been something they considered/toyed with, it doesn't seem to be something they're doing. Also, auto-selection of interesting tags was only part of what I suggested, answerer vs asker is very important too.
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Ben VoigtJun 7 '14 at 15:39

I don't think this is the answer @BenVoigt. Although you are right that experts should have a good experience, this isn't what the suggestion achieves. Nor do I think that you can encourage askers of crappy questions to ask better questions by showing them good ones. (As people have pointed out, those people probably don't start at the front page anyway.) The point is to 'nudge' less expert answerers away from trying to 'level up' by spoonfeeding solutions to bad questions, and more towards writing and improving useful answers to good questions (by showing them more of the latter).
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jwgJun 9 '14 at 8:16

@jwg: I say this is the best thing we can do with the front page, which is the topic of this discussion. Not that it will solve all the problems. If you have ideas to stop solutions to bad questions, start a discussion about those. But don't hijack the one about the homepage.
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Ben VoigtJun 9 '14 at 13:16

I am talking about the homepage. You seem to have missed the point somewhat.
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jwgJun 9 '14 at 13:34

@jwg: If you meant to talk about the homepage, you failed to communicate your suggestion. Why don't you write it up, clearly, as an answer?
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Ben VoigtJun 9 '14 at 14:07

Since you're the only person who has had trouble understanding my comment (so far), why don't we move this to chat instead?
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jwgJun 9 '14 at 14:24

@jwg: I really have no idea what your disagreement with this answer is. You said it's not doing enough to stop solutions to bad questions, but you didn't say what would. Are you saying my suggestion would increase solutions to bad questions? Or just saying it won't be very effective at my stated purpose? Well, whether very effective or only a little effective, it's better than any alternate use of the front page I've heard.
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Ben VoigtJun 9 '14 at 15:52

"There is no reason whatsoever for the view shown to a guest user to be optimized for finding answerable questions." Except if we want new experts to be drawn into the community. Giving them a bunch of softball questions they can sink their teeth into will go a long way to bringing them back. Let's not assume that new users have no interest in answering questions - or that those who aren't interested in answering questions won't be tempted to do so and thus become valuable contributors.
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Adam DavisJun 10 '14 at 18:38

@AdamDavis: You still want them to read a bunch of good answers first, so they decide SO is a community worth being part of. Afterward, finding questions to answer is as easy as clicking the "Unanswered" tab.
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Ben VoigtJun 14 '14 at 0:10

I like this answer but I disagree with one of your opinions. But I can see how it would be the case for many. I have more questions under my profile than answers, but I really do want good questions to come along as often as possible. It's just that I don't like writing short answers. I like to go into detail and even a bit further, and 95% of the time there are already 5 new answers by the time I've half-finished mine. So I just become unmotivated and leave, since usually more than one of those other answers are correct.
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jay_t55Aug 27 '14 at 5:18

I'm going to formalize an answer that @MrLister raised in one of the comments to an answer: is this really a problem?

To elaborate: Hopefully there are some statistics about what people do after they hit the home page. Do they then ask a question (generally indicating they are searching for an answer)? Do they log in (indicating they want to help?)? Do they look at one or more (or how many?) of the questions there (indicating what?)? Do they do something else?

My informal, totally unscientific survey (of about 3 people working with the SO site) is that the only time they go to the home page is by accident. If they're searching for answers - they come here via a Google search. If they're answering questions, they come here based on filter results notifications.

I'm not sure the home page needs changing, but I would need a better understanding of how it is actually used.

Personally, I use the home page to find questions to answer. (If I'm looking for answers, I use Google.) I like how it shows primarily questions from my favorite tags and recent activity, without having to fuss with tag filters or anything else. A question was asked a while back that is similar to your informal survey, but larger in scope: How do active answerers find questions to answer?
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Cody GrayJun 9 '14 at 0:47

3

I think it is an issue - I like to read good questions and answers to them too, so I can learn and get general community suggestions on topics. I feel like I have to give a lot more on StackOverflow, while previously I also used to learn a lot browsing at other good questions.
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IanJun 9 '14 at 17:58